Rick Holmes: The new normal - hot

Pick your adjective: steaming, sweltering, suffocating and sticky. It's really hot across the country. But this is July, and hot days in July are normal, right? Not exactly.

Rick Holmes

Pick your adjective: steaming, sweltering, suffocating and sticky. It's really hot across the country. But this is July, and hot days in July are normal, right?

Not exactly.

The heat wave that has gripped most of the country recently is unusual in size and duration. At one point, 141 million Americans were living under heat advisories. Thousands of new local high-temperature records have been shattered.

New records are set all the time, both on the low and the high side. That's normal. But more than twice as many high-temp records have been set this year in the U.S. as low-temp records, continuing a trend of the last few years.

Hot days in July are normal, but the National Weather Service predicts temperatures will be "above normal" for the next two weeks in most of the eastern U.S.

And "normal" itself is changing. Every 10 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), uses 30-year averages to recalculate what it will call "normal." So, effective Aug. 1, the new "normal" will average .5 degrees higher than the old "normal."

Higher temperatures aren't the only new normal. Floods are more widespread and more severe. Droughts are deeper and last longer. Pakistan and Australia were devastated by floods last year; much of Colombia is now underwater, thanks to a year of constant rain.

As the lower Mississippi crested at record high levels this spring, it ran by parched fields and failing crops. The American Southwest has been in the grip of a drought since last fall. Corn and wheat lay withered on the ground. Ranchers in Texas and Oklahoma are selling off herds of cattle, skinny from picking at pastures that have turned to dust.

Climatologists have begun referring to the Southwest's problem not as a temporary drought, but as long-term aridification. Models show the rains just won't be coming back. Author Alex Prud'Homme notes in The New York Times that Perth, Australia, may become the first major city abandoned because it runs out of water. "Similar fates may await America's booming desert cities: Las Vegas, Phoenix or Los Angeles."

Also part of the new normal are the secondary effects of drought. Wildfires get worse every year - the fire season in the American West has grown by 78 days since 1970. Drought means famine, spikes in food prices and moving masses of starving refugees. In the Horn of Africa, 10 million people are in need of humanitarian aid, the U.N. reports, victims of the worst drought in 60 years.

These trends shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has followed climate research these last 20 years. While experts have tried to be cautious about blaming global climate change for any specific weather event, they've long predicted that warmer temperatures would bring more drought, more floods, more intense storms of every kind.

The "new normal" won't last. At this rate, it will just get worse. Arctic melting and sea level rises are exceeding earlier predictions. Carbon dioxide emissions, a chief culprit in global warming, are going up, not down. Emissions rose by a record amount last year despite the economic slowdown, to nearly 31 billion metric tons.

One high emissions scenario I've seen projects that by the end of this century, the climate in Massachusetts will resemble the current climate of South Carolina. As I write this, it feels like we're already there.

"Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it," is an old joke that isn't funny anymore. As temperatures rise and the dire predictions of climate scientists come true, nobody in Washington shows any interest in doing anything about it.

President Barack Obama's performance on this front has been especially disappointing. He talked about the threat of climate change in 2008, but has done little about it since. He did nothing to help Democrats trying to push through climate bills in 2009. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the New Yorker, a string of Obama administration policy decisions, from delaying restrictions on mountaintop removal coal-mining operations to speeding up the awarding of offshore oil drilling permits, will only increase carbon admissions. Activists fought all the way to the Supreme Court to secure the Environmental Protection Administration's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions - an authority that, so far, Obama refuses to use.

What's worse, while Obama regularly consoles the victims of extreme weather events, he has had almost nothing to say about the big climatic picture. His failure to use the bully pulpit is part of why Americans seem less concerned about climate change today than a decade ago.

But Obama is a climate crusader compared to the Republican Party, which has become a cult of climate deniers. As the National Journal put it, "the GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe."

Republicans in Congress have their own climate change plan: Get rid of those pesky climatologists. Not only have House Republicans tried to deny funding to any EPA climate-related enforcement, the House budget now in the works includes more than $200 million in cuts to NOAA and NASA aimed at reducing the agencies' ability to collect climate-related data.

Next they'll propose taking everyone's thermometers away. That way we won't know how hot it is. Rep. Ed Markey's response to the budget cuts: "It's not the heat, it's the stupidity."

Heat waves are deadlier than storms, floods and tornados, so take it easy as we suffer through a summer that looks to be hotter than the new normal. At least 22 deaths in the U.S. have been blamed on this heat wave, a number that's sure to grow.

Last summer a heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 56,000 people. I wonder how many Americans have to die before Washington decides it's time to stop talking about the weather and start doing something about it.

Rick Holmes is opinion editor for the Daily News. He blogs at Holmes & Co.

Community Info

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
The Lake News Online ~ 918 N. Business Route 5, Camdenton, MO 65020 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service